[aka armageddon for dummies]

Someone may have to die, before it's all said and done.

Theoretically, survival is the issue.
Metaphorically, we are talking rebirth.
Acoustically, it's all dead and sung.

We're just taking our knuckle down time
on this cautious walk along the concrete
that crumbles and kicks up a fury of dust
no matter how much we wish for quiet.

Peace, too,
if we wanted to believe in anything
besides mistakes and those long
nights I spent drinking in a bathtub
that was more of an exercise in limited
light than most of your best intentions for me.

But this is no time for sentiment.

Considering the pre-recorded histrionics
of our intensely casual acquaintance,
taking you out still seems opportunistic,
though I know I have to take the shot.
Convince me otherwise;
surely there's got to be a better way?

But now is not the time to get political.

So you say.
But then, you always were one
for talking too much.

Like the time(s) you told me to slow down.

On those days when you were an obscene
shadow in that hallway where the light bulb
never, ever fucking worked as it was supposed to.

Then again, nothing works as it should
blown out, unscrewed, discarded
and darkness always was my good side,
my night in shining amour, a shameless mother
to rescue me from the clutches of humanity.
To be given life, you have to take it.

However, I refuse to be drawn
into the big philosophical picture.

I had a feeling you would say that.

Pretty much,
it's the same way I can wager
your anger from the noise dominating
the background of those phone calls
you used to put so much stock in.

But then distance became a cause
for your never ending and rather
ugly concern about the way we couldn't
be bothered to answer each other
in anything but clear, honest English.

Distance was enough to fatally rupture
all the things you muttered about me
in an appreciative, even loving voice.

The paper crown of strikingly realistic thorns,
was just one of many odd games we used
to play in a crippled brick house for two
thousand lonely nobodies packed into
a couple of dumb, stubborn, optimistic kids.

When I think about it now,
it was probably your favorite game of them all.

For me, it was the way you bent the rules
like a pleistocene megalomaniac
hunting to extinction those PlayDoh myths
proclaiming the virtues of bio diversity.

Meanwhile, despite everything that never happened
I'm suited and tied to the grind
that unwinds in adversity
way beyond this uneventful horizon,
where survival necessitates
gouging out the eyes of faith
and broadcasting tongues
to the four corners
of a vacuous diminishing sphere
reserved for cautious feet
seeking their unbalanced alter-egos.

Now is the time,
while I can simulate some semblance
of syllogistic sanity.
It passes, as do faeces
so we are now in the shit.
I'm primed to explode
into a thousand pieces of make-believe
while you're trying to save me
from pharmacologic extinction.

Or save myself.

You just never know,
past a bottle of something
cheap, vicious, and ugly,
I'm kinda tricky like that.

In any case,
at the end of another long day,
I don't think there's anything here
that a back alley at the end
of the world as we've always known it
couldn't cure in a heart attack beating
down your spine and into those thin
hands of yours I wouldn't change
for the same world that's going under
faster than a thirty minute infomercial
those racist preachers love so much.

In any case,
I do love you.

Though I'm not sure you've seen it recently.

And what do I see?
Dead pigs and flying sheep;
somehow I know they won't keep me warm
when I'm crushed beneath the debris
of a guilt-striken crusader
wiped clean from history
like fathers who love their daughters
with bare hands and diseased hearts
and mothers who kill their sons
with a kindness that soothes
like opium administered by Slipknot.

Saving is the stuff of
rainy day disaster movies
financed by pension fund prophets
with nothing much to do
between erectile dysfunctions.

This way you can spend yourself
like there was no yesterday
and I will love you
when there's no tomorrow.

Well, if you were to ask me,
I'd call your best and only bet
at sticking around long enough
to see what real damage control
can fail to salvage on a work day.

I'd light an unfiltered cigarette
and mutter something about
love and brutal honesty being
spread out over a twenty-page
comic book that tells our story
in a few tense, A-bomb sentences.

Then I'll switch the blade from my back
to the tip of your thin, arrogant throat.

A comeback for any occasion?
I wouldn't put it past you in the least.

Especially since I suspect we'll still
be doing this at sixty and climbing faster
and faster and don't you wish you could
just breathe comfortably through the whole thing?

You and me both, love.

So time is running out,
but this is not the place
for trite indulgent aphorisms.

08/23/2016

Author's Note:
The last unposted duet in my repository for dissociative iconography.
I can now bore myself to obsolescence with airboard solos.

Posted on 08/23/2016
Copyright © 2024 Laura Doom